Letters: Eve
by WillaLu
Summary: This is a collection of letters sent from Eve to various people in her life, while she and Adam are separated, as they often are. I will continue adding letters during National Novel Writing Month. Some of the letters seek to explain events mentioned only briefly in the film. The rating is simply a result of Adam and Eve's beautiful, loving intimate relationship.
1. I

_This is a piece I am working on for NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) 2015, which will be submitted in pieces as a way for me to hold myself accountable for continuing the work. I'm not at all up to snuff on the daily word count, but at least I'm writing something. It's the spirit of the thing that counts, right? ... Right? Anyway, enjoy my lovely Adam and Eve musings. It will be written as a series of letters, each letter being a chapter._

Dear Kit,

The thing about time is that the more you have of it, the more it seems to curl in on itself, to overlap and spiral, rather than following one instant after the other as dominoes do. The vast scope of memory becomes less like a straight line and more like an ocean, each moment a bobbing ship, some of them anchored in the same place forever, others racing each other toward the harbor which is the forefront of the mind, others still drifting aimlessly, or sunken, a wreck of bones at the bottom of those dark waters, untouched by light or warmth for centuries. There are instances when pieces of abandoned vessels, a salt-bleached board or a bit of canvas and rope, wash unexpectedly ashore, unwelcome reminders of old voyages.

I am in Sibiu. The panorama image of this quiet place, its orange tile rooftops stacked one on top of the other, its endless arid sky, is only a small raft, a tiny whitewashed fishing vessel, in the immeasurable waters of my time on this earth. Places like Milan and San Francisco, they are massive Navy crafts heavy with gilt, lamplight spilling golden and alive from every porthole, glistening like a city on the black waves. Still, I will savor this: the scent of flatbread cooking on hot stone griddles, the sounds of men laughing on the dust and cobbles street beneath my window. I am surrounded by the music of living people changing, killing one another, falling in love. Before me is the ancient, crooked blue spine of the Himalayas, which reminds me intimately of the Appalachians, the Adirondacks, the Kush, the Cascades. Mountains are mountains are mountains, and all of them were under the sea in the beginning. They hold onto the age-blackened shells of ancient bivalves like family photos of relatives they never knew, but whose stories they cherish.

I've been renting a comfortable attic bedroom from a widowed Romanian woman who makes her living crafting beautiful, ghastly jewelry out of bones that she scavenges from the desert. Her work is lovely. I am now in possession of a pendant, a statement piece really, that she made from half the broken jaw bone of a wild dog, hung from a leather cord with the oil-slick feathers of ravens and strings of polished wooden beads. The necklace reminds me of the spring of 1796. Adam and I spent the season under the Rincon mountains, a bowl of red clay surrounding what is now Tucson, Arizona. We were holed up against the rainless months with a small, isolated group of Tohono O'odham people, three or four sparse families who had made their camp at the edge of a deep arroyo, one of the few which still contained any water fit for drinking. The desert stretched out endlessly in all directions, a shadeless waste. There was the occasional oasis, of course, but they were few and far between. There was no shelter from the daylight in most places unless we stooped to bury ourselves in sand. Before us all was the promise of starvation. We were trapped along the side of that narrow gorge, all of us, for our own reasons.

The Tohono knew what we were, of course, being an intuitive people, and well-travelled, with clever gazes and pragmatic minds. They called us "Skin-Walkers," after a legend belonging to their people, of men and women who transformed into animals at night to devour human flesh. Though this seemed closer in nature to werewolves or shape shifters, it was their best guess, and the intent was the same: prey on the living when the sun goes down. They greeted us with solemn faces and stern warnings to keep away from their children, and in exchange for a dark place to sleep during the merciless white-sky hours of day, we fed without killing. Some nights we caught rabbits with our keen eyes and quick hands, seeking to repay them. It was a different time, cruel in different ways. Adam was still so new, and the American West was still such a foreign place, a scattering of people, lean livestock, and slipshod homes groaning and shuddering in the gritty wind. We felt we had entered another world. When the coyotes and the thin yellow hunting dogs howled at night, their voices echoing off of the Rincons' red stones, Adam threw his head back and howled with them.

That first desperate night, when we stumbled drawn and harrowed upon the edge of the arroyo's shimmering green water, the oldest woman among the Tohono O'odham people received us with a grave expression on her face, warm brown and etched with deep lines from years spent squinting into the brutal sun. The rest of the encampment was asleep, but the woman told us that she had seen us coming, that she had been waiting for days for the two of us to drag ourselves to her across the hot sand. She spoke to us in a crippled, stilted Spanish, knowing that we were strangers, that we couldn't possibly understand her own language. It was very strange to converse with someone in such stark, practical terms about what we are and how we survive, having just travelled through a land inhabited by so many ruthless Catholics.

"We all try to live," she said to us, her head bowed, "what way we can. I think you are the same."

She refused to look us directly in the eye, or touch us with her bare hands, but it was clear that she was not afraid of us. We were like wild animals. Perhaps she believed that if she touched us, we would become covered in the scent of the living and never leave. Adam took a liking to her, calling her _abuelita_ even though it made her scowl at him. During the day we slept in our dark hut while the tribe ate and worked and sang around us. At night, we walked alongside the arroyo, which in the darkness was a bottomless black gash in the ground. Adam wanted me to touch everything we found in the desert - every bone, every piece of broken pottery weathered by time - and tell me how old it was. I obliged him until the effort made my head ache, and then I made up the dates to please him. "This one is very old," I would mutter to him, my eyes closed, my fingertips hovering just above the cracked lip of a wooden bowl he found buried among the roots of a gnarled smoke tree.

He was always restless in the mornings, so childlike, resisting sleep in favor of staring up at the ceiling with wonder, rapt by his own musings. His head was already so full of poetry and philosophy and science. He wanted to know everything.

"Eve."

"What is it, darling?"

It was dark as pitch inside our hut. Its windows were covered by several layers of thick cloth, but the heat still persisted, encroaching on us through the clay walls, heavy and oppressive. We lay sprawled on the floor without clothing, only touching one another at the lips and ankles. Outside, the Tohono children were playing a game with the dry wooden ribs of a dead saguaro, cut down and blackened in places by heat lightening. We could hear them laughing and shouting to one another. Their language was like the sharp-tongued secret speech of the Coyotes. I could have tried to learn it, as I had learned English and French and Hindi and Russian and so many others, but I liked listening to the rolling, tumbling syllables undistorted by meaning. I touched Adam's lips with my fingers as he spoke, feeling him shape the words.

"How do you think our brains work?"

"Adam, please," I protested, and he took my hand away from his face to kiss the closed lids of my eyes, a gesture which never failed to make me feel impossibly young, younger than I had since the age when we spoke the slow riddling tongue of trees, the age of standing stones.

"We've started to understand the way the human brain works," he said, charging ahead, "and how important it is, but I can't help feeling that we still have much more to discover."

"Adam."

"I think we're missing an integral piece of the puzzle of human consciousness, and I think that missing piece may be the key to reanimation, Eve, to immortality."

I kissed him. He inhaled slowly through his nose, an old reflex from a far different time, his large spidery hands drifting up to frame my face. These were still his fledgling days, and I remember them with an aching fondness, that heady, burgeoning time when he came to me like a moon, drunk and captivated. Sometimes I miss that. He was certainly easier to keep up with. At the time, I already knew that the compulsion would only last another half century or so, if even that. None of us can stay young forever.

"There is no key, my love," I whispered against his slack mouth, "There is no door. We are not immortal."

"But-"

"Listen, darling. Immortality is everlasting life, and you and I are not alive, technically speaking."

"What are we, then?" His voice was soft with impending sleep and he tucked his head into the crook of my shoulder.

"We are something else, something different. Now sleep."

I knew that he wouldn't allow himself to fall asleep until I did. I knew that he watched me. The living call sleep the little sister of death, but for us in this time of dry air and aching silence, there was no distinction. We fell into a place without dreams, dying each day as the sun rose.

We woke starving.

At dusk, Adam's eyes were bright, wide, and roving, hungry like the eyes of the skeletal yellow dogs that followed the desert people from place to place, their long muzzles lowered into the clouds of dust that formed around their chapped paws, scenting for food. The music of the sand-colored desert frogs heralded the night hours. I rose and dressed in a thin white garment that was meant to be a slip, but which served me well as a light weight shift dress. We both wore far less clothing out here than we had in the English and Portuguese colonies to the east. We would have to return there soon, of course, having found the Southwest nearly uninhabitable, but we were determined to enjoy the freedom of more natural society in the meantime. Adam stood naked and watched me weave my hair into a thick white plait.

"Will you teach me how to do that?" he asked, a bit timidly, and I smiled.

"What, darling, braid?"

"Please. I want to braid your hair for you."

He touched my bare shoulder blade with his fingertips, almost reverently. A breeze stirred, sweeping a miniature whirlwind of sand in through the curtained doorway. The air was just beginning to cool as it relinquished its hold on the warmth from the sun which it had secreted away in the hours before. I could feel my skin cooling as well as I leaned outside. I heard the rustle of fabric as Adam begrudgingly pulled on his breeches, still barefoot and bare-chested behind me.

It was a young man this time, sitting just outside the entrance to our hut, waiting for us to beckon him inside. He had a labyrinthine image of a snake winding around and around itself painstakingly tattooed across the backs of his muscular shoulders. He stood and brushed the sand from the backs of his thighs, and we greeted each other in the broken Spanish his people had become accustomed to using whenever they conversed with us. He was strong, fiercely alive, his face set in a stony mask of bravery. _I am not afraid of man eaters,_ declared his dark brown and his straight, thin mouth. I suspected he was some kind of warrior, or else one of the men who kept and commanded the hunting dogs. He was beautiful, but in a way to which I was completely unaccustomed to seeing up close. Adam is blade-like, all angles and severity, the blinding loveliness of light shone through a jagged piece of ice. This man, his was the beauty of amber, of sunrises, of foxes and smoke trees, warm, round, thriving. He ducked inside and took his place between us on the colorful woven sleeping mat. He stumbled a bit, his eyes unaccustomed to the darkness, and I guided him down with my hands on his shoulders. He smelled of wood smoke, and I could hear his heart pounding. A muscle in Adam's jaw flexed.

I know what you're thinking, Kit, dear. There's something a bit distastefully ritual-sacrifice about the whole ordeal, with the strapping young man kneeling between two monsters with his wrists upturned, left on the mat to be collected before we returned in the morning, but it was a necessary arrangement which kept us all alive in a time when food was becoming increasingly scarce for every species.

I had only lived this way once before, in Persia, and I had done it alone, a pale blood goddess in a stone cave, stranded, visited nightly by the same terrified woman. It was sickening then. Having Adam with me made things easier, made me feel a bit less like a beast. It was also a great relief to be living among, and depending upon, a people who understood our nature and did not approach us with fear. They feared pain, of course, and darkness, but don't we all?

I am grateful to no longer live in that time, when the seasons themselves trapped us, and others like us, in whatever sunless corner we could find. At times the rows upon rows of buildings, the miles and miles of car parks where the world's forests one were, break my heart to pieces with their selfish reproduction, but then I remember the desert beneath the Rincons and I am grateful for the abundance of shelter. There is always somewhere to be. It's very rare now that any of us find ourselves truly stranded.

When the rain finally came, it was in the middle of the night. We had all been expecting it, smelling the air, watching the patterns of the ravens and the great wheeling hawks in the sky. The air was crackling with wet potential. Adam saw the first droplet plummet from the gathering clouds and ripple on the surface of the arroyo's reserves, silver rings dancing outward and dissipating against the banks.

"Finally," he breathed, and I ran my fingers through the dark tangle of his hair. We stood as the first fat drops pattered to the ground, and then the rain fell in slanting white sheets from the black sky, soaking through our clothing, running in rivulets down our upturned faces. In a matter of days the arroyos would be filled again. Water would rush through them, foaming, like a river. People and animals would flock to the emerald pools filling pots and clay jars and bellies. The Tohono O'odham woke to the sound of us whooping and cheering into the sky, and ran into the downpour with their arms outstretched and their mouths open. We laughed, all of us, old and young, living and otherwise. We laughed, and we danced until the thick sandy mud coated our shins. The women dropped to their knees at the arroyo's edge, cupped their hands together, and drank deeply, singing prayers of gratitude.

We stayed with them until we could cross the desert safely. Once the air was cooler, we could move much faster during the night, fast enough to find a dark place to hide until dawn. It was a desperate way to live, but then we made our way east again, dressed again the way that the English settlers did. We passed through Louisiana and lingered there for a time, resting, gathering strength, and then found a boat back across the Atlantic.

"Eventually we will have to find a place to stay for more than a few years, you know," I told Adam, and he grinned at me, boyish and stubborn, stealing my heart.

"Eventually. We have forever, my lady, and a world to see."

I miss the way the rain smells in Tangiers, my dear Marlowe. I miss watching lovers dash across the streets beneath shared black umbrellas, splashing through puddles in the stone streets. I don't know where Adam is now, maybe somewhere in South America. I can never be sure. I know you think it's silly, the way that we drift away and then come together again and again, but we both have a great need for solitude, and in very different respects. There are times when Adam needs to be in a place where his life and his quiet are untouched by the zombies. There are times when I need to be in places where I can watch people being alive.

Please know that he does miss you. I hope that the next time I see you in person, I will be able to bring him with me, so you can tease him about it yourself.

I adore you. Kiss Bilal for me.

Yours,

Eve


	2. II

Dear Bilal,

I hate to trouble you, but I sent a letter to your teacher three weeks ago from Sibiu and have yet to hear back from him. I sent it to the cafe's address, of course, with your name on the envelope. Did you receive it at all, or has something gone wrong with the international post? I do hope my correspondence finds you.

In case he never did receive word from me, I would like you both to know that I am safe and well. I am taking care of my health, though it's not nearly as easy here as it s when I have you two taking such excellent care of me. Please, don't worry about me, and don't let Marlowe worry about me either. He should only be concerned with his own well being right now. I know that he is well cared for under your devoted attentions, and I must thank you for that, my friend. You are an irreplaceable treasure. We would be lost without you.

Along with this letter, I am sending you a tin of the herbal tea that is made, served, and sold at the small open front tea house that stands within short walking distance of my rental flat. I haven't tasted the tea, of course, but I love the way it smells. I've seen people drink it hot or cold, but always without anything added to it, no sugar, no milk or honey, just allowing the flavors to stand alone. I think it has arvensis in it, wild mint, which you like, if I remember correctly. Please, have a cup for me, and when you return my post, describe to me exactly how it tastes, so that I might indulge in a vicarious experience. I would enjoy that very much.

Hopefully I won't he to spend too much time worrying while I wait for you and Marlowe to get back to me. In the meantime, I will continue to collect pieces of this place to send to you. I think you would like it here. It has a lovely night sky, full of constellations.

Be well, my friend, and write soon.

Salaam,

Eve


	3. III

My Dearest Kit,

I am so glad to have finally received word from you. It's a relief to know that you are feeling well. Please thank Bilal for me. His descriptions were lovely: "Cool and bright, clean, like the way the air smells after a hard rain." That smell actually has a name. It's called petrichore. I don't know what that would be in Arabic, but I'm sure he could tell me.

Being out here is making me very wistful. All this open sky provides the perfect canvas for projections of memory, and I spend a great deal of time thinking about the places I have been before, alone and with companions. Today I am thinking of Paris. If you still have that picture of Adam, Ava, and I standing beneath the Eiffel tower, please send it to me. That was our first day in the city of romance. We all look so beautiful and so happy.

I miss Paris. I wish I could go back, but that isn't possible, at least not without a great deal of consideration for detail and a great deal of effort toward remaining unnoticed, and at that point it can hardly be called a vacation anymore. It occurs to me that I haven't told you the whole story of what happened in Paris. It was the nineteen thirties everywhere else in the world and people were hungry and full of anxiety for the future, but in Paris, the abandon that had characterized the twenties for most countries was only just beginning. The new musical style had taken its time crossing the ocean, and France was strolling into brass and tumbling pianos the way that its citizens strolled through its carefully manicured city gardens. While the rest of the world fretted and gnawed its fingernails, Paris bloomed, and Adam, Ava, and I found ourselves at its center, bathing in sweetness.

We were staying at a lovely, lavish hotel - I can't remember the name - with a ballroom and a grand staircase, all brass and mahogany. Autumn was making its slow leisurely way through the city, lighting the sidewalk trees ablaze in gold and crimson, filling the streets with the scent of bread and leaf decay and cold stone. Adam, if you can believe it, was wearing a suit, charcoal grey and slim, with a silk tie in wine bottle blue. I couldn't convince him to polish his shoes, unfortunately, but scuffs aside, he looked very handsome. I liked the fashion of the thirties. In the previous decade, women were liberated considerably from old ideas of modesty, but the style of flappers was impractical. Don't misunderstand me - I thoroughly enjoyed ten years of fringed skirts and endless strings of freshwater pearls - but after those ten years had passed, I was grateful to wear closed toe shoes again, and hats that did not require four pins to stay securely affixed to my head. My sister and I wore high waisted skirts and belts with circular buckles, felt cloche hats, and neatly embroidered white gloves. We all felt sharp and clever, as if coming into France from the United States made us time travellers, as if we were cheating by living through the Jazz Age a second time.

It was the music we has become enamored with, of course, so different from the riotous dance tunes taking over Britain and the United States. It was jazz alright, but not the party music we had become accustomed to. In Paris, the pianos had voices like thin spinsters. The accordions and violins were widows and lean men with cigarettes. There was joy, too, but it was more human, more lasting, the sort of joy that is felt for simple things: a place to sleep, the safety of one's family, the comfort of a lover. I found Adam a beautiful blue and white concertina, and he played it as the three of us strolled through the city at night, dancing ahead of us, Ava and I walking after him arm in arm beneath the lights of the Tour du Eiffel. He learned his way around the instrument quickly and with ease, as he always has when given the opportunity to create music in a new way. The melodies he invented spontaneously some evenings, leaning against lampposts with that wry grin stretched lazily across his face, were simple, but lovely. He played us a great number of waltzes in our hotel room. I tried to teach Ava the steps, but she only wanted to spin and spin and spin until she tumbled to the floor in a dizzy heap, where she ran her fingers through the thick pine-colored carpet.

What took us to Paris in the first place was a simple whim. For Adam, it was the music; for Ava, the evolving fashion; and for myself, the people. I adore the French, such a pragmatic culture, but still so passionate. They have the elegance of the English without quite so much pretension, and the romance of the Italians without quite so much shouting, though I like the English very well when I am in England, and the Italians when I am in Italy. We were in a club, a low-ceilinged place with grey stone walls and a band playing in one corner, no stage to speak of, and a young Parisian couple came to speak with us. One of them was very tall and very thin, with sharp features and sand-colored hair that grew in tight curls. Rather than sitting down, he leaned against the wall next to Ava, playing with the knot of his plum-colored tie and staring down the front of her dress. The other was broad shouldered and dark, his jaw shadowed, his suit jacket slightly too large for him. He sat down between Adam and I, leaning on the table with one elbow, staring into Adam's face very intently. He was quite drunk, reeking of cognac, but smiling.

"Why did you come here, really?" he asked in a strange but beautiful blend of English and colloquial French, his black eyes narrowing. He clearly was not originally from Paris, whereas his lover exuded the very scent of the city. Even in the smoky dark, the young blonde fellow's eyes shone with the tower lights, reflecting the glow of the monument like the Seine.

"To find myself," Adam offered, only half joking. For a moment it seemed that the phrase has suffered in translation. The dark man who was most certainly not from Paris, who may even have been German judging by the shape of his face, stared at him, uncomprehending.

"Are you drunk?" Adam was startled by this, to say the least. "How do you find yourself? You would first have to lose yourself somewhere, like your wallet or your house key. You are sitting right here next to me, yes? Not forgotten on a train."

There was nothing anyone could have said in response to that brilliant gem of Common Man's European philosophy, really.

We spent almost eight months in that strange, lovely city, and almost every night in that little club. There was a man, a violinist, who played there sometimes whom Adam took a liking to. This happened often then, and happens occasionally still, that he would encounter an artist or other great mind of some kind and, in a sense, fall in love with them. It's a delight to observe, to see him leaning into the sound of someone's voice, or their theories, or their poetry on a page, sighing against their genius, enthralled. Each time this happened, I liked to take a step back and watch him. Once it had been Shelley. He had fallen into her words, her clever eyes, gracelessly like a boy. She made him laugh and made him think. I am sure it would have been a joy to witness. In Paris, as a vibrant autumn faded into the muted lavender hues of winter and the Seine turned silver underneath a moon haloed by illuminated crystals of ice, it was Stephane Grappelli.

He was a beautiful man, tall, with a square jaw and coal black hair. He played jazz violin. The first night we saw him play, I thought Adam was going to fall out of his chair, he was leaning so far forward, trying to get as close as possible without getting up from the table and walking right over to the man. I watched Adam's long, slender fingers moving in the air, up and down the neck of a phantom fiddle. The music was enchantingly expressive, in turns sighing and laughing. He would play a heart-wrenching lament one moment, and in the next he would have us leaping up from our chairs to dance. Oh, how we danced, Kit. You would have loved it. I knew that first night that Adam was going to dive into this man's work the way he dove into Byron's and Tesla's, the way he dove into yours (though he thought, like most do, that it belonged to someone else). So I took Ava to fashion exhibits and to the opera, the latter of which she did not enjoy nearly as much, while Adam sat on the club's damp back steps until dangerous hours, talking shop and playing along on his concertina. Some nights we were invited to join them, to listen to some tune they had conjured together from thin air.

Stephane, who was quite young and a bit timid, looked at my Adam with a great depth of affection, much in the way that I sometimes catch Adam looking at me when he thinks my attention is focused elsewhere. For months, every time that brilliant boy picked up his violin, whether in front of the club's patrons, or on a street corner, or on the back steps at night, he played for Adam. It was beautiful. I felt it would have been wrong of me to interrupt them, to encroach on their company. Occasionally, we are very fortunate to find zombies who are a little more than zombies, and they capture us. We are caught in the warm light of their humanity, their aliveness. For a time, we love them, as Adam loved Shelly, as I loved Klimt. For a time, we become the shadow just behind them, the whisper of the muse over their shoulder, but we can't keep them. Either they die never knowing what we are, or they carry our secret to the grave. Because of this, I was satisfied to leave them be. I didn't mind spending my time with my sister, both of us wrapped in woolen capes. I didn't mind being apart from Adam for most of the night. I had him all to myself at dusk, before Ava woke up, when the sky was still grey over the river. I enjoyed our quiet moments together, and I enjoyed seeing him enthused over something, anything, again.

Stephane was a romantic man, a man of deep feeling, who one night decided to share his life story with us between songs. His mother, a Frenchwoman, passed away when he was four, and his father, an Italian journalist, was drafted. He was raised in Paris, if you'll believe this, by none other than Isadora Duncan. She taught him to dance, but during the war had to surrender him to an orphanage until the bloodshed ended. Adam was absolutely rapt as Stephane told us of the first time he ever held a violin, at the age of twelve.

"I learned to play on my own," he told us. "I listened to the men playing in the streets. I wanted to play like that."

Outside, rain fell, heavy and grey with the beginnings of a terrible ice, and somewhere, someone was playing the alto clarinet. Adam closed his eyes and listened, and I let my gaze rest on the shadow his long, dark eyelashes cast just above his cheekbones. Speaking softly over the drifting street song, the city's feral music, the violinist murmured lovingly about America, his romance with jazz when he was fifteen. He couldn't have been much older than that, really, maybe eighteen or nineteen, but he spoke as if it had happened lifetimes before. There was practically no one else in the club with us aside from a sparse handful of regulars, sitting on their own or in exclusive little clusters like secret societies. It was a quiet night, almost time for the club to close, for people to begin trickling out and sniffing through the streets for some place that stayed open until three and still served alcohol. Adam was sitting backwards in his chair, long legs splayed, his concertina on the floor at his feet. I sat next to him with my shoes kicked off under the table, and Ava was up walking about aimlessly, the same way that a lion might walk about aimlessly among a herd of zebra.

I love my sister, I truly do, but there are times when loving her is a considerable undertaking. There are things I have been through with her, or because of her, that I could have done very well having never experienced. There are things my sister has done that make me cringe, and probably always will, even though I adore her. The incident in Paris is one of these. I don't think of it often because, quite frankly, it disgusts and embarrasses me. But you have seen me almost at my worst, old friend, and there is nothing I would ever be ashamed to tell you. In fact, I am surprised I haven't told you this story before.

A restless Ava is a dangerous thing. A restless, hungry Ava is even more of a risk. When she glided up next to me and whined that she was "absolutely wasting away," I should have paid attention. I should have taken her back to our hotel so she could feed. I was selfish. I wanted to stay and hear more of Stephane's wonderful stories, see Adam's face light up at every noteworthy name uttered casually like the name of a childhood friend: Isadora Duncan, Paul Whiteman, Joe Venuti, Louis Armstrong, Michel Warlop. It was the perfect night, and we were inside where it was warm, while outside the cold was descending on the river, the cobbles, the wooden benches where the homeless slept underneath their paper and tarpaulin shelters.

When Ava wants something, she does whatever is in her power to get it. I didn't realize what she had done until I smelled the blood, and by then she had already started in on her second victim. The first lay slumped sideways in his booth, eyes blank, neck a mess of disconnected tendons like frayed wires. Stephane, poor man, saw her tear into the arm of the club pianist. He fell over backwards, taking with him the stool he was perched on.

The stool landed on his violin.

The sound it made as it splintered into pieces was the sound of a heart breaking.

The violence didn't last long. Adam and I worked quickly, and much more cleanly than Ava. We managed to take down three of the witnesses. The other four got away, but they were drunk as olives, and probably wouldn't remember the scene clearly enough to relate it to anyone, only recalling bits and pieces: blood, a tearing sound like someone pulling a wing from a roasted hen, running, rain and ice, a taxi. While they ran through the door like rats down a burning staircase, Stephane, dear Stephane, sat on the floor with the remnants of his violin on his lap. Adam stood a few feet away from him, hands helplessly outstretched.

"I'm sorry," he said, "I'm sorry."

There is no need for me to detail to you what the club looked like that night, what Ava looked like lying on the floor, reeling from all she had consumed. To describe at any length the amount of carnage, the awful silence that descended that night, would do a terrible disservice to the men who died there. I think you said it better than I ever could in _Richard III_ when you wrote:

'Tis a vile thing to die, my gracious lord,

when men are unprepared and look not for it.

You are the uncrowned king of poetry, my dearest friend, and so I will leave the lyrical lamentations to you. I will not make a poem of the deaths of those people, because I am partly responsible. I should have gotten Ava out of there much sooner, but I was concerned chiefly with myself.

We gave Stephane a choice. He chose to be turned, to keep the secret, to have no grave after all and instead carry the secret forever. He was not afraid of Adam, and so Adam turned him, cradled him against his chest. He chose immortality. Still, it is my understanding that he died, truly died in permanence, only seventy one years later. I believe he chose that, as well, though while he lived, he did continue to make beautiful music, poignant, haunting.

We had to leave the country at once, of course, and very quietly. We went by train, and then by boat back to America. We found out from a good friend several months later that one of the four men who had run drunken from the club had gone to the police, and had a sketch done. They never found the people in those police sketches, of course, because we are very good at disappearing, but the new owner of the club hung the sketches up over the bar and told everyone who asked about the drawings the brutal story of how the previous owner was devoured by monsters. Naturally, we made the decision to give up on Paris.

It's interesting to me that whenever something like that happens, the story that is told in the aftermath never paints us like vampires. We sound much more like cannibals in all of the tall tales that evolve from the chaos we occasionally create in human lives. I wonder sometimes if this is not just another sign that we as a race are not meant to last on this planet, even as a legend, a fairy tale. We will be forgotten. We will become wolves, savages, man-eaters. Maybe we will become something even less defined, as all the stories melt together, losing their individual shapes with time and telling. Maybe we will just be Monsters. Or Fear.

I'm not sure that I intended to get so serious in this letter, but I suppose it was meant to be this way. This is a story whose shape only grows sharper around the edges with every rendition, which is why it has had the power to keep us out of any entire country for decades. I am glad to have shared it with you. I know you could tell me all about the living nature of words, how narrative is an organism, growing, breathing, changing, dying, and living again. Please tell me, Kit. I look forward to it. I look forward to seeing you again. Please do send that photograph. I would like to have it when I am with Adam again, to remind him what we looked like, what he looked like standing next to Ava during the time when he could still say that he loved her.

Thank you for enduring my prattling, my dear friend. I enjoy having someone to recount the past with, since there is so much of it. If you think you can stand it, I would like to do this more often, share these old tales with you. Call it catharsis. It's cleansing in a way. I miss you. Tell Bilal he writes beautifully.

Yours Still,

Eve


End file.
